It was 4 rounds. 1 last round with hiring manager. 2 rounds with engineers team and it was solving leetcode questions. There are multiple questions about security and system engineering and some questions about data processing
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Santa Clara, CA) in Jan 2026
Interview
I had a one on one with the hiring manager and then a eight hour loop with four one on ones, a design challenge, a presentation, and another one on one with the hiring manager
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Apple (Mountain View, CA) in Dec 2025
Interview
Coding interview using colab (no need to run the code). They paste the problem as you go and 3 questions in total. The role is about AI and LLM so the question is based on that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LLM decoding problems and the question of using softmax.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Apple (Tel Aviv-Yafo) in Feb 2025
Interview
2 different Interviewers each an hour separately, asked me to summarize one of my previous papers and asked a few short questions about it, and then each asked about 5 technical questions in various topics
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked questions about different topics, from what I can recall
1. Describing Inpainting models during training and inference
2. Suggest a training framework for the face recognition on Iphones
3. What is vanishing gradients and what network architecture was proposed to solve this issue.
4. How to calculate Phi without using any prior
Research Scientist applicants have rated the interview process at Apple with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 64% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Research Scientist roles take an average of 56 days to get hired, when considering 18 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Apple overall takes an average of 29 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Apple as a Research Scientist according to 18 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 25%
Phone interview: 18%
Presentation: 15%
Skills test: 15%
Background check: 13%
Group panel interview: 8%
Other: 3%
Drug test: 3%
Personality test: 3%
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